


Pets at Home - Cleocatra

by Vgwd



Series: Pets at Home [2]
Category: Being Human, Being Human (UK)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-21
Packaged: 2017-12-09 02:15:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/768806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vgwd/pseuds/Vgwd





	Pets at Home - Cleocatra

It was supposed to be her year of firsts. She'd decided that on the plane. And she'd made a list. She liked lists. Back when they were useful aide memoires. Now she doesn't want to remember.  
Her list of firsts:  
First time on a plane.  
First foreign holiday.  
First time away from her family.  
First time using her A-Level spanish.  
First kiss (hopefully. With Matthew Collins.)  
First sex. (She's Catholic, not a saint and it seems like everyone else is at it all the time)

And it has been a year of firsts. Just not the ones she wanted and not in the way she wanted and she's lost track of time so it probably hadn't been anywhere near a year. 

She'd enjoyed working at the school, she liked the children - so eager to learn. And she had been flirting with Matthew. (almost ticking the kiss off her list on two seperate occasions). She had been happy. Doing good work, helping people. Broadening her horizons. And then they attacked.  
She didn't know who (what) they were at first. She'd thought militia, criminals, drug dealers? She wished she'd read more about Bolivia before she'd flown out there. But probably vampires weren't mentioned in the travel guides any way. Who would suspect vampires were attacking in daylight?  
When they attacked, she'd seen the children run. Seen the other volunteers, Father Costello, running as well. Then falling, then bleeding, then dying. She'd herded the small group of children she had with her into the cupboard and tried to keep them safe. She'd failed. Mr Snow had broken through the door in seconds and thrown her to one side before feasting on the children. He drank their blood like Ribena. When he was sated, he'd turned to her with those dead fish eyes and his teeth stained with centuries of gore. She'd been frozen. Literally frozen in place, conscious that she's wet herself. He'd dragged her from the school which was inexplicably burning. Why was it on fire? Buildings don't just go on fire. She'd been confused, stupidly thinking about her passport being destroyed even as she was being driven away.  
She'd woken up some time later in a cell. Mr Snow had explained, quite patiently, about fugue states and that she was his pet now. He was going to keep her and did she have any preference for her new name? She was kept in the cell for a while longer, alternately being fed then feeding, her owner sipping her blood like a connoisseur at a wine tasting.  
Time was plastic in the palace, she learnt that. The time when he wasn't there was brief; when he was it seemed eternal.  
He had introduced her to a bafflingly disparate group, finally telling her his name which had made her laugh. He sounded like an ice cream man. That was the last time she'd laughed, the last time she spoke of her own volition. The punishment had been bad. Cruel and inventive and had left her with no feeling in her left hand. Carlos had come off much worse for his laughter. She'd heard the guards talking about it. He'd ended up tossed on the growing pile of bones in the menagerie.  
After the punishment Mr Snow had given her a collar. To wear like a dog. Which had made her cry for about a week. It had kept him away for a while. He didn't mind that she was crying. He positively encouraged that, but she knew he found it annoying that he didn't know why she wept. And that he could not make her tell him.  
At first, he'd kept her chained to the wall by her collar, like a guard dog. But she'd learnt to behave herself and now he let her off the lead. She had the right to roam anywhere in the palace but she preferred to keep to his suite. She felt safer there, the irony of that was not lost on her. The other inhabitants scared her and she supposed it was a case of better the devil you know.  
Sometimes he brought her gifts, handing them over with elaborate courtesy. The obscene avuncularity that made her skin crawl. They weren't designed to make her happy. He did it to make her sad. Dressing her in the stolen trinkets of the dead, made her so desperately sad. For the same reason he rarely drinks from her now. She eats so little that she is weaker now. He drains other humans dry instead of her. She smells the blood on his breath and she knows that she has bought her life with someone elses. Everytime he kills someone else, she survives longer.  
It is those moments that leave her curled up in the darker parts of his suite. He makes them worse. When he finds her like that he smiles. He leads her to the bed, savouring her anguish. He lies next to her, his long fingers grimy with blood flicking over the buttons on the remote control for his stupidly big telly. He finds what he wants, which is a report with such gruesome footage that it makes her nauseous, and then he starts to talk. He settles down and speaks in his low, invidious voice that crawls into her soul like a virus and makes her want to scream into his face or drive knitting needles into her eardrums. Except where can she find knitting needles here? Everything dangerous is kept away from her, except Mr Snow, because he can't stand mess.  
Mr Snow doesn't keep away from her, he comes home (home?)sometime, drenched in blood and sated, spotlessly clean and angry at others. He keeps her close to him, lying next to her at night, perfectly aware that she can't stand his cold dead flesh pressing on - and sometimes in - her. She can't stand it and she can't stop it. She doesn't know how, so she endures it. She doesn't fight anymore. Not often anyway, so when he brings her a new collar with her new name on it she bows her head and lets him tighten it. She wonders what name he has chosen he made her write a list of them last night - Mittens, Tabitha, Mrs Pickles, Cleocatra (that last one was quite good actually. And he's says he's met Cleopatra so according to him it works on two levels)  
While Mr Snow touches her, his teeth grazing the scars from before he realised she wouldn't fight him, before he realised she would let him kill her without a murmur, he tells her they are going on a trip. He has business abroad and he's taking her with him, but he doesn't want her to get lost, or adopted by someone else so she'll wear the collar so that everyone knows she has an owner. It's for her own safety. He makes it sound reasonable. Perhaps she should be grateful.  
When she speaks, her voice sounds strange. Obedient.  
"Where are we going?"  
"To South Wales, my dear, Won't that be nice?"


End file.
